Pittsburgh Pirates: Preparing for an Abnormal Offseason, Again

The Pittsburgh Pirates and the rest of the teams across Major League Baseball are preparing for an unusual offseason.  For the Bucs, this is two years in a row.

Many are expecting a potential game-changing offseason this year for teams across baseball, including the Pittsburgh Pirates.  Already, a large number of veterans have been cut from their respective teams, including high profile players Brad Hand, J.A. Happ, Corey Kluber and many others.  This is because of the loss of revenue from the 2020 season, so the expectation is that this will be one of the oddest offseasons in recent history.

However, this will be another odd offseason for the Pittsburgh Pirates after having one last year.  Entering the 2019-20 offseason, the organization went under a lot of changes from top to bottom.  This started with Manager Clint Hurdle and Pitching Coach Ray Searage getting fired at the end of the season.  Then, team President Frank Coonelly left the team, which led to the team also letting go of General Manager Neal Huntington.

This started off the offseason in a very abnormal way.  The team was not just looking for a new coach or GM, they were essentially looking to replace their whole organization.  This would be a really slow-moving process.  The first move was when the team hired Travis Williams as the new President.

The General Manager process was delayed because the team had to find a President first. Meanwhile, other teams had already moved forward with their searches.  The Bucs finally hired Ben Cherington on November 15th.  The issue with this was that the team hired Cherington during the MLB Owner Meetings.  The MLB Owner Meetings are known for setting somewhat of a foundation for every team’s offseason plans including the always active Winter Meetings.

This put the team behind the eight-ball.  Cherington was not really able to get acclimated to the Pittsburgh Pirates organization in such little time before the Winter Meetings.  He actually admitted this later in the offseason that they did not want to make a lot of decisions because they had such a late start to the process.

This offseason is once again set up to work against the Pittsburgh Pirates.  After having a conservative first offseason, the expectation was that he would much more aggressive in this one.  However, that may be hard to do for multiple reasons, including the revenue issue.

The other issue that could stop activity is the fact that both the Owner Meetings and Winter Meetings will not be held this year. This is obviously where a lot of work gets done and Cherington would have had a good opportunity to get aggressive in rebuilding.  While this is still possible, it will once again be a more challenging offseason than usual for the new regime.